This invention relates to bottle treating apparatus including a combined bottle filling and closing machine, a bottle labeling machine, bottle conveyor means extending therebetween, and means for synchronously driving the machines and conveyor means to fill, close, and label bottles.
With the bottle treating apparatus presently used, the different treating machines are located a certain distance from each other and they are connected by single or multi-slat bottle conveyors, sometimes combined with accumulator tables. The reason for this arrangement is to prevent a short stoppage of one machine from effecting the other machines of the unit. The accumulator tables can take a certain number of bottles delivered from the filling and closing machine and can deliver a certain number of needed bottles to the labeling machine. It has been thought to be essential to allow the bottles to accumulate between the combined filling and closing machine and the labeling machine. The accumulator equipment, however, causes further disturbances, as in case of transferring and braking of the bottles, coming out of the filler in one line and being separated into several lines, or when bottles are accumulated onto one line in the infeed of the labeling machine, the bottles often break or jam. In addition, the accumulator equipment requires a lot of room and causes most of the noise in the bottling room because of the continuous clashing together of the bottles. Also, one operator is necessary for each machine, because the machines are installed too far away from each other to be served by a single operator.
There is already known a bottle treating unit, including several machines located on the same side of a continuous conveyor. With this machine, disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,613,858 transferring of the bottles between the machines is done by conveyor worms. A synchronous drive of all machines is effected by a regulating device, which senses the speed of each machine and effects their drive. The constructive efforts for achieving a synchronous drive are excessive. To permit the machines to be easily accessible, a certain minimum distance therebetween has to be observed, and this leads to a high area requirement. The conveyor worms are long and require many intermediate bearings.
Another bottle treating unit is known, in which the two machines are also mounted on the same side of the conveyor which transfers the bottles (German Pat. No. 913 747). Because of the disadvantageous arrangement of the machines, one operator is necessary for each machine. The area requirement is high and transferring the driving power between the machines requires excessive effort. Since the bottles cannot be transported by the slat conveyor with equal spacing from each other, a separating device for the bottles is necessary just before the labeling machine, so that trouble-free transport of the bottles between the two machines is not provided.